The Bride of Dreams

by Frederik van Eeden

Call Holland a dreamy country because its beauty is as that of a dream. Sometimes it is black, wildly inhospitable and dispiriting - and suddenly, in calm, mild weather, the entire country with its trees, canals, cities and inhabitants sparkles in an indescribable tender radiance, enhancing everything with a deep mysterious meaning impossible to explain or describe more fully, and resembling the peculiar beauty of dreams. One must have seen my little city from the sea on a still, clear September eve, when the sun goes to bide behind the bell-tower, flooding the cloudless, luminous blue-green heavens with orange and gold, when pastures and the shadows of trees merged in a fairy tinted blue haze unite in wondrous harmony - when the milkers come home with heavy tread, balancing at their sides the pails of cobalt blue - when all that sounds is harmonious from the striking of the clock on the tower to the rattling of a homeward driving cart, and all that breathes from the coarse Hollanders to the dull cows seems wrapped in this selfsame peaceful, poetic evening bliss - one must have seen it thus to understand how much all this resembles the wondrous illusion of our dreams, when in some inexplicable manner the simplest object gleams with a glow of heavenly splendor and unspeakable beauty and for days can fill our memory with the bliss of it.

But the inhabitants of this dreamy little country do not like to be called dreamy. As I understand the word, it is a compliment better deserved by my own countrymen; but the Hollanders themselves feel flattered, though quite erroneously, when I casually remark at the club that the Italians are a much dreamier people than they. To the Hollander a dreamer is a blockhead and a dullard, and our broker, a little fellow with gray beard and little leering cunningly-stupid eyes, who thinks himself very smart because he knows bow to eke out a profit everywhere and thus to swell his bank account, always states with much satisfaction that he never knew what it was to dream. When he sleeps he sleeps absolutely and is conscious of nothing, thus - of less even than when he is awake. And the doctor - a fat jovial young fellow of strong mulatto type and popular for his good-natured cordiality and stale college jokes - says that all dreams are pathological and the best medicine for them is a good cigar and a stiff rum punch before retiring.

A Dutch peasant in his blue blouse, on a meadow flooded by the golden evening sun, amongst the black and white cattle, with a background of white and pale green dunes in fine undulating outline, is a marvel of dream beauty. But he himself knows nothing of this, as little or even less than the cow beside him. And the broker and the doctor only recognize it when a dreamer such as Rembrandt or Ruysdaal has revealed it, and the papers record how many thousands of golden gilders their reverie has yielded. But in my country the humblest peasant lad, clambering barefooted and singing down the Piedmontese foothills behind his black goats in the golden evening light, is enough of a dreamer to have a clear conception of the grand concert of beauty whereof he is a single tone. In the cities it is of course equally bad everywhere, and dreamers are as rare among the sleek, smart officers and loungers of the Toledo in Naples as among the portly, blond-bearded sons of the merchants and shopkeepers in the Kalverstraat at Amsterdam.

Now it also seems to me that he who dreams is more awake than he who sleeps, and that he who spends a third part of his life in utter unconsciousness better deserves to be called a sleepyhead and dullard, than he for whom the dark nights are also vivid and rich with pulsing life. To me it has always seemed a shame to lie like a stone for so many hours, and to arise from sleep no wiser than when we sank into it. And after having experienced several times in my early youth that sleep possesses riches of sensations and a wealth of rapture that surpass the intensest joys of brilliant day, shedding behind them a radiance that penetrates the brightest daylight as sunshine penetrates an electrically lighted hall, - I began to pay more attention to my dreams and, especially in dreary joyless days, to look forward to the nights in which I had unmistakably felt the shining presence of such great treasure.

As to the doctors' opinion regarding the morbidness of dreams, I refer again to my observations on the philistinism prevalent among physicians, and I know from very positive experience that there are healthy as well as morbid sensations in sleep, precisely as in the day-life. I may speak with some authority because in my day-life I never experienced any serious morbid disorder and no doctor could ever cast a doubt on the excellence of my health. Yet for me a dreamless night is a bad night, and I call the man who passes his days in the following of perverted and inharmonious impulses, in deviations from the good instincts for refreshment and nourishment, for propagation and accumulation, for peace and happiness, and his nights in dull unconsciousness and thoughtlessness, dead as a cork, or at most, a little mad temporarily from foolish and confused dreams, - such a man I, with good reason, call sickly and abnormal.

For our highest instinct, that like a stately royal stag, proudly holding aloft his widely branching antlers, should take the lead of all the wanton and timid flock of our impulses and passions uniting and guarding them, is the impulse toward beauty, toward sublimity, and toward purest blessedness. Even the mighty passion for knowledge, which impels us so untiringly to seek for the secret of life, is subordinate to this, though it is the second in rank - the most beautiful hind of the flock.

And if in our sleep and dreams we perceive, more distinctly than in the day life, signs of the highest beauty and the purest bliss, - should we not then give them our closest attention?

And this I would now point out to you, dear reader, as the first new idea, strange - till now - to the present world, the first thought-child pulsing with life and future promise, born of the profound union of my experience and contemplation:

The solution of the secret of our lives lies in our dreams.

You think - do you not? - that this solution is not attainable to man. Nor indeed is it - at least not to mortal man. And yet all mankind, through the medium of its naturalists, is patiently and hopefully seeking it. But, though they have already unearthed much that is useful, measuring and recording and comparing with ever finer and sharper instruments, they are still digging in a direction that inevitably leads into a blind alley.